Panoramic photography, the taking of a photograph or photographs covering an elongated field of view, has a long history in photography. Perhaps the most primitive method of panoramic photography is the taking of several adjoining photos with a conventional camera and then mounting the prints together in alignment to achieve a complete panorama. Modern techniques adapt this method by using digital cameras to capture the images, and then using computer image processing techniques to align the images for printing as a single panorama.
The continuous development of digital camera technologies along with constantly increasing speed and processing power of computers have laid the foundation for digital imaging systems that are capable of acquiring image data for the automatic creation of wide to entire 360° panoramas, including both still panoramic images and dynamic panoramic movies.
Currently, main-stream panoramic imaging solutions can be generally categorized into the multi-lens approach and the single-lens approach. Multi-lens panoramic camera systems utilize a set of cameras for simultaneous image or video capturing. The cameras are typically arranged in either a parallel fashion or a converged fashion, such that each camera's field of view overlaps with that of at least one other camera. This way, the total field of view covered by the multi-camera systems is significantly enlarged as compared to a conventional single-lens camera.
Existing multi-lens panoramic camera systems are typically based on wide-angle fisheye lens cameras. However, wide-angle fisheye lens cameras are often bulky and expensive, and as a result, the existing panoramic camera systems using such cameras are also bulky and expensive to manufacture. Moreover, a fisheye lens can introduce severe geometric distortions and definition losses, especially on the edges of the captured images. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to completely correct such defects caused by the fisheye lens from the images using de-warping techniques.